Music for Dancing Percussionist Dancing itself begs description. The performance of the percussionist allows the body a tremendous range of movements, echoing the command of dancing. By studying one of the masterpieces of Iannis Xenakis, Rebonds A, percussionist Mei-yi Lee and composer Lam Lai examined its augmented perspective, restructured the movement of the percussionist by providing the body with its great flexibility and mobility. With the conventional notation and the new position of the drums, an unfamiliar way of dancing began to speak.

A coproduction of the Munich Biennale with Musik der Jahrhunderte Stuttgart, commissioned by the West Kowloon Cultural District; in cooperation with Connecting Spaces Hong Kong / and the Zurich University of the Arts; and the Goethe Institute Hong Kong With kind support by LOVAAS Sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation

In Bubble <3, an audience is led on a guided tour of an apartment block, repeating the same walk three times around the exterior of the building before finally entering a domestic living space. Audience members are encouraged to form different sub-groupings for each of the repeated walks through various methods of performative and spatial intervention. Specially conceived vignettes of everyday activities take place as the walk progresses; a cacophony of musical outbursts, random noises, and unfiltered dialog simulating the endless chatter of anonymous trolls on online forums.

With every repetition, a moment of familiarly is muddled by confusion about the authenticity of events encountered. This culminates in the interior scene, where the bubble of speech is replaced by the mute bubble of four walls, and previously unplaceable sounds take on new significance as a composed sonic-architectural configuration.

The elevated cloud of a dreamMusic theatre work for electronics, Cello and guitar
performed by Wen Chin Fu on Cello and Lam Lai on Guitar

‘Space is elevated, the ground is elevated, even time is elevated.’ Robert Schumann wrote a set of thirteen pieces of music, ‘Scenes of Childhood’, for piano in 1838. Movement No. 7 of this work, Träumerei, is one of Schumann’s best-known pieces. In 1926, cellist Pablo Casals made a gramophone recording of this piece. The elevated cloud of a dream compiles the memoir of this work of Schumann. Sound, the movement of the performers and space are braided with the stream of time.

A part of An exposition, not an exhibition, Hong Kong Solos is an artwork by Ari Benjamin Meyers that will take place at six non-profit art organizations—Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong Arts Centre, M+, Para Site, soundpocket and Things that can happen. Meyers invited six local Hong Kong composers to create new works for staff members at these organizations across the city. In order to experience these intimate pieces devised for 1 performer and 1-4 audience members, potential listeners are invited to book visits to these institutions. The work centers around bringing together usually disparate parties: a composer and an art professional, a performer and a visitor, and the members of the art and music worlds of Hong Kong.

PRINZ TR – 15for Voice and Tape
Departing from the study of speech as music and rhythm, Lam Lai’s piece is scored for Chantal’s voice and portable tape recorder in a work that explores the machine’s biography and how music can capture shifts in space and time.

“A while ago, when I was in the midst of promoting one of my concerts, there was a question that came up in my mind: ‘When is the best time for the arts? Or when is the best time not for the arts?’ In this work ‘I’m there,’ I create an actual situation in which the art is surrounding us, in a place where we usually wouldn’t stay long or just pass by quickly. The most suitable few places to install this work would be by the waiting area of a washroom, the corridor, or the waiting island halfway across the road. The video is a 30-minute loop. Unexpectedly there will be a one-minute video clip showing a few times within the loop. This one-minute video clip is a modification of a moving street view from Hong Kong, which I captured from the inside of a car. The work is an attempt to record a very simple scenario in your memory, the moment that you notice the video is playing near you. If you are waiting to see the next one-minute of the video clip, congratulations, we are in the same group of people who are eager to see more arts in our life.”